


miracles (and other ambiguous things)

by Anonymous



Series: boys of the raven variety (my TRC fics) [1]
Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Blue Sargent-centric, Book 2: The Dream Thieves, Extended Metaphors, F/M, Multi, My earlier fic didn’t really have those two, Noah Czerny-centric, Other, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, even though they are my favorite characters, so this is what I wrote to make up for that, this is pre-poly I say so
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-12
Updated: 2020-07-12
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:20:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,414
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25225246
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Blue has two soulmates— the one on her wrist now, and the one she lost.
Relationships: Noah Czerny/Blue Sargent, Richard Gansey III/Blue Sargent
Series: boys of the raven variety (my TRC fics) [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1827523
Comments: 3
Kudos: 28
Collections: anonymous





	miracles (and other ambiguous things)

**Author's Note:**

> let’s just pretend that scene on the mountain where Gansey and Blue pretend to kiss takes place just after TDT instead of near the end of it  
> Also stream I know the end by phoebe bridges and overexposed (enjoy) by car seat headrest cus I listened to them on repeat while writing this

He had been meant for someone, once. A soulmate, etched into his skin, a pitch-black melanin tattoo symbolizing the person with whom love would be serendipitous, with whom the line between where he stopped and they began would blur into something nebulous and wonderful. 

He blurs an awful lot, nowadays. A bleached-outline of a boy, not a person and not _gone, why isn’t he gone, why isn’t he here, who is he?_

He blurs an awful lot, and wonder feels like something that had bled out with the rest of him. 

He is a decomposing polaroid in the dirt, slowly dissolving into something indistinct, a scream slowly decaying into background noise. 

He isn’t bitter. Anger takes so _much_ , an emotion too heavy for his ghostly hands to carry. 

He had been meant for someone once, back when he had been someone. But that was a narrative cut short, a string of fate unravelled by the circumstances. Fate was a box with holes; it leaked incessantly. 

But then there is Gansey, alive like a heart attack. Richard Gansey III is someone to whom fate had been served in metric tons. Gansey is _purpose,_ overflowing like a dam. 

Then there was Gansey, and he breathes the _something_ back into him, and it isn’t enough, _is never enough_ , but it is something, and beggars can’t be choosers. 

“What’s your name?” Gansey’s voice is a tether to life, and the ghostly boy grips it as tight as his fragile existence can. His self bobs above the ocean waves, gasping for breath, and in those choked sobs, he finds a memory of a boy. 

“Noah.” And he has a name, and he is Noah, and Gansey has enough purpose for the three of them and the world besides. He had been meant for someone else, once, but fate is an indolent God, and his soulmate is just another thing that had slipped through the cracks in his skull. 

“Is that all?” Gansey asks, bemused. 

“Yes.” Noah responds, his quiet voice louder than it had been in years. “That’s all there is.” 

He is meant for Gansey now, he figured. He is not quite enough to round out another person, but he is enough to Gansey, and Gansey makes him _enough_. 

“I’ve always liked to find old things.” Gansey tells him, “I’m good at it, too. The world is a great big place full of broken wonders begging me to be found.” He stretches out his arms, as if the world itself is something he can grasp, if only he reaches beyond the barriers in his way. 

_Yes_ , Noah thinks. _Lost things are nothing, until they are found. It’s better to be a broken something than not to be at all._

_A cup, a fish peeking over the rim._

_“It’s from tarot.” Noah had been told. This made sense. Lots of marks were from tarot._

_“It symbolizes possibility.” They had said, and this made sense, because the world was full of possibility, and it was wonderful, and Noah Czerny was alive._

_Then he got bludgeoned to death with his own skateboard by his best friend, and he wasn’t alive anymore, and his wrist was as smudgy and indistinct as his eye._

_Noah figured his death had held plenty of possibility, for Whelk._

Blue Sargeant’s life is one filled with casual miracles. 

Miracle Number One is a skateboard in thin dark lines. Blue Sargeant has been born, and she is meant for someone, as is the case for billions of others. The world goes on, relatively unchanged. It takes more than a miracle to make headlines, after all.

_Richard Gansey III is born with a goblet on his wrist and a fish leaping from the brim._

_In the soft light of the window, Richard Gansey II could have sworn the scales shone a bright red._

_He blinked, and it was gone. Color is unusual in soulmarks, something unique. Gansey Sr. was a collector of oddities; it was only natural for his brain to see what it wanted to see._

It takes about three weeks for the inhabitants of 300 Fox Way to fully realize Blue’s ability. It is cause for what Maura calls a ‘Household Gathering’, which means that it is an excuse for Peresephone to serve plum pie and for Calla to toss her shoes across the room and stretch across the length of an entire sofa in the name of ‘blood circulation’. 

“Blue,” Maura begins, lifting the infant in her arms slightly in indication, “...has a very special ability.” 

Calla claps her hands over Orla’s ears. The young girl releases a squawk of indignation that goes entirely ignored by its listeners. 

“No shit.” Calla says dryly, and releases Orla, who sticks out her tongue and runs to the other side of the room to escape any further indignity. 

Maura watches the whole affair with a vaguely disapproving quirk of her lips. She sighs, takes a bite of pie from where the plate is balanced on her knee, and continues: 

“It appears that her presence…” She stops to gather her words, “-amplifies the clarity of psychic readings.” 

“Shit.” Orla says, because she is already tired of no longer being the household’s center of attention. Persephone laughs, Maura sighs yet again, and Calla looks about ready to strangle Persephone for her evident amusement. 

“I’ve got an uh-bill-itty too. I took that from your head.” Orla nods smugly towards Calla. Persephone hunches over in a fit of giggles, her small face and dark eyes entirely obscured, transforming her into a quaking cloud of white. 

“No,” Maura replies, trying not to smile, “-you just heard Calla say that another time.” 

“Did not!” She sing-songs, running up the stairs in the hope of being followed. 

And so as Maura finishes her slice of pie in a large, undignified bite before beginning to breastfeed Blue, who has started to hiss in a precursor to wailing, and Peresephone flutters off to get herself another slice, and Calla stands by the stairwell and tries to figure out how long she should wait before her ascending won’t give Orla the satisfaction, the family meeting concerning Miracle Number Two meets a typically jumbled and domestic end. 

_It was a nice night turned sour. One moment, the sun had been on it’s graceful fading path down the sky, and then next, wind whipped and rain stabbed into the ground below with a vendetta._

_Maura Sargeant had sighed, resigned, and taken the umbrella out of her bag. Persephone had insisted this was a night with ‘possibility for change’. Persephone would have a bright career in weather forecasting, Maura decided. It was a job for psychics dressed blandly._

_Blue drew patterns in the quickly loosening dirt beneath them, her jacket soaked through to skin from where it jutted out from under the umbrella’s dominion._

_Maura sighed again as a previously uncharted hole in the paisley-printed tarp allowed for a wet spot on her shoulder. This was going to be one of the longer nights._

_And so it continued on, with Blue, wet and increasingly sleepy, pressing into her side as she shouted to be heard by the spirits over the roar of the storm. Half the names were gone before they reached her ears, but still, she wrote what she could and resigned herself to this being one of the less productive years._

_Finally, the last spirit made it’s desolate march through the courtyard before dissolving, and Maura stuck her notepad, damp despite her best efforts, in her bag. She shook Blue’s shoulder gently and began to rise. It was time to go._

_As they shuffled their way to the car, half-blind and soaked to the knees in mud-puddles poorly avoided, Maura heard a sharp yelp amidst the thunder and rain, and the warm pressure of her daughter against her side disappeared._

_“Blue?” Her voice felt faint in the roar in the storm. The woman saw a form crouched in the mud beside her. A moment and she was up; ever resilient, that was her Blue, she thought lovingly._

_Maura began to continue her trudge towards the car, but she was stopped by a wet hand tugging her sleeve. She turned._

_Red. That was the first thing that registered against the blue-gray of the moon-lit rain, bright and unrelenting. A crimson splash of paint on an ash canvas._

_A split second later, she realized it was blood, streaming towards the crook of Blue’s arm in downpour-diluted rivulets from her wrist. New blood surfaced more quickly than it could be washed away, a rising sea against her skin._

_Some memories consist only of a single image, a moment so loud as to drown out all others._

_As Maura frantically unwrapped her soggy scarf to wrap against her daughter’s wrist, as she drove at inadvisable speed against the steel torrent of rain pressing toward the vehicle, as she herded numb-with-shock 9-year-old Blue into the ICU, as she was reassured by nurses that her daughter would be fine, only one scene would stick clearly in her brain, and it was this: red, bright and alive, against gray._

Blue remembers lots of things from the night she lost her first soulmark. She remembers that dismal St Mark’s Eve, remembers slipping on something, _nothing,_ like she had tripped on something _within_ her rather than something under her feet. She remembers the color red, remembers the dull hum of pain in the background noise of her mind, weakened by shock and adrenaline. 

She remembers the lurch of their car around mountainous hairpin turns, remembers the pain in her wrist rising in a crescendo as exhaustion waxed and adrenaline waned, remembers that all-too-large burgundy spot growing like a lichen on her mother’s paisley scarf. 

She remembers the emergency room, remembers the sound of Maura’s voice making frantic calls to Fox Way from the hospital phone, remembers the sickening poke of the blood transfusion needle in her arm, remembers each of the stitches distinctly, sharp _lines_ of pain along the greater throbbing valley of her arm. 

She remembers the conversation of the staff around her, some to her, some to each other, some with the audience unclear. She had alwaysalways had hated that, when the target for someone’s words wasn’t clear. Growing up with five women in a small house will do that to a person. 

_‘Right over her soulmate mark, poor thing.’ An orderly whispered._

_(It was whispered with the intention of keeping Blue from hearing, but Blue was eleven, not two. She knew exactly where the wound was. )_

_(She also objected to being called a ‘poor thing’, for that matter. She wondered if they ever called Aglionby boys ‘rich things’ in a pitying mumble under their breath. No, she decided, probably not.)_

_(Soulmate marks don’t grow back; scar tissue is a tough and pervasive sort of creature. That was okay though, because she was alive. Her vein had been cut, but she was alive. A missing mark didn’t mean no soulmate, after all. Blue was, a little to her own chagrin, a very sensible preteen.)_

Blue has her stitches taken three weeks after what 300 Fox Way had already taken to calling ‘The Incident’. It is brief, uncomfortable and entirely uneventful. A scar in three intersecting lines runs red and angry along her veins. Then, the nurse places the skin-tape over the still-sensitive wound, and that was that. 

Until it isn’t. Because a few days later, the tape falls off. This, the doctor had assured her, was normal. 

What isn’t normal are those three intersecting lines embedded charcoal-black into the skin of her wrist, as if another mark had never seen the light of day. 

She tells Maura, who tells Peresephone, who sighs sadly in that too-quiet and too-knowing way of hers. 

And then Calla, who overhears Maura telling Peresephone, storms in, doubting and brash. Only after snatching a bewildered and bemused Blue’s arm and rubbing the skin with the pad of her finger until it blooms pink does she accept the reality of the situation. 

The reality of the situation being that the situation had no place in reality. 

Maura combs the library, while Calla uses the public computers to conduct an equally thorough scope of the internet (because she is better at those newfangled electronic sorts of things). 

There are tattoo specialties, yes, for the re-application of scarred-over soulmarks, and plenty of clickbait articles about the tragedies that resulted in the loss of them. There is, however, absolutely no record, reputable or otherwise, of scarred soulmarks simply _being replaced_ by another. 

Upon hitting this dead end, they give up, because there isn’t any record of someone with Blue’s psychic-amplifying abilities either. Stranger things, they decide, have happened. 

And so Miracle Number Three occurs with a rather understated amount of fanfare. Strange things become oddly mundane, in a place like 300 Fox Way. 

_“There are only two reasons a non-seer would see a spirit on St. Mark’s Eve,” Neeve said. “Either you’re his true love . . . or you killed him.”_

Which one? _Blue almost asked, because curse or not she had a strict personal code that generally prohibited killing people. She almost asked Neeve this, even positioned her lips to do so, but stopped. She wasn’t sure Neeve knew about ‘The Incident’, and she also wasn’t sure she wanted to have to go through the ordeal of explaining it._

_That, and Neeve was a stranger, aunt or not. Soulmates were kind of a personal thing._

_When she got back home, she crashed onto her bed and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep. Miracle Number Four, it seemed, would be dealt with at a later date._

“I do have a question. About the journal, I mean.” Blue says into her helicopter -mic. Her hands feel strangely sweaty, and she presses them wrist-down against her thighs and tugs down her sleeves. 

It was one thing for her mother to draw her mark in the shower steam, or hell, even for Neieve to doodle it as some sort of weirdly invasive observation, but he doesn’t know, _couldn’t know_. Her sleeves that night had been long, she knows; she had dug through the laundry to check. 

It couldn’t be true. _She has to know._

If Gansey notices the tension in her person, he doesn't comment. “Shoot.” His voice cuts through the background hum of the chopper-wings, sharp and authoritative. 

Blue thumbs the journal open to the page where he had drawn it, had drawn _her_ mark. 

“This.” She pointed with her unmarked hand. “What does it mean?” 

“Oh, that.” He responds easily. “That’s the ley -line.” And so he begins to explain things she mostly already knows from one source or another. She nods and hums in response, but his voice is only a deep, pleasant background noise in the arena of her skull. 

Ley-lines. The Corpse Road. What does it all mean? _Who_ does it all mean? 

_There are lots of reasons Blue was envious of Orla, and she would admit none of them._

_She was jealous of her long legs, of the casual confidence of being 5’9 without heels, of her psychic abilities she took just as for granted likeas the rest of 300 Fox Way._

_She was jealous of Orla’s bare skin, neglected entirely by fate and serendipity and mystery._

_Some people, Blue knew, despaired over their lack of a mark, but it didn’t seem to bother Orla._

_For Orla, it meant freedom, choices, choosing her own path._

_Blue thought she would like that too._

Blue opens the door to Monomouth softly, feeling like an intruder in the space. It falls shut behind her with a thump. She gulps, and the dryness of her throat stings. 

“Blue!” A voice comes from somewhere adjacent to her form. She turns, and Noah melts into existence from the dust-mottled air. “It’s good to see you!” He grins, a not-quite-there flash of straight teeth and tongue. 

( _Teeth like a military graveyard_ , she thinks, remembering it from a podcast Calla let her use her phone to listen to sometimes.)

She remembers the cool touch of that tongue on her lips and feels her cheeks grow warm. 

Blue smiles softly. “Hey, Noah.” She holds up her hand in a greeting. 

His smile falters. “There’s no one here right now, though. I can tell you where Ronan and Gansey are, if you want-“

“You’re here.” She points out, laying her bag and bike helmet on a chair. 

She wanders into the area she’s pestered Gansey into transforming into a makeshift kitchenette. 

(“You can’t possibly just get takeout whenever you’re hungry!” “I’ve got food! There’s, uh, these!” “Gansey, that’s an expired package of animal crackers.” )

“Where’s the cups?” She asks Noah. She’s secretly a little relieved for the two of them to be alone. She likes Gansey, and even Ronan has his charms, but this was their place. With Noah, she isn’t a trespasser. 

Noah cheerfully opens and slams shut mismatched cabinets like he’s considering his poltergeist potential. Finally, he finds the cups, mostly tourist-themed mugs and glasses Gansey purchased because he thought they were funny during his many travels. 

“Oh. Right. You don’t really drink, do you?” she realizes. 

“Nope!” he replies cheerfully and moves to fill her cup with water. “Ice? Gansey got us an ice-maker ‘cus Ronan kept whining. It’s pretty neat.” He knocks his pale fist on top of the machine, eliciting a few rustling and clunking noises within. 

“Of course he did.” She sighs. “No thanks.” 

He nods and thrusts the mug towards her. It reads “NEW YORK MAKES IT WORK” with an anthropomorphic drawing of New York State grinning and giving a thumbs up below. This one, she suspects, had been bought entirely to make Ronan scoff in derision. 

Blue gulps some water and leans against the wall. 

“So,” she starts, “I kind of wanted to talk to you about something.”

“Me specifically or just someone?” He asks, glancing to meet her eyes. It seems impossible for him to be dead, with so much behind his gaze, as if the entire essence of Noah had been concentrated into something behind his pale eyelashes, while the rest of him sparsely occupied a form-stretched-thin. 

It’s disconcerting, his left eye swimming bright and alive in the blurred spot where his skull had been smashed in, undeniably and grotesquely dead. 

“You, specifically. Talking about this with my family would be awkward, Adam and Gansey are out of the question, and I think Ronan would sooner shoot himself.” 

“Oh,” he replies, walking torwards his room and beckoning with his hand for her to follow. She does. They enter the pristine room, and he flops silently onto the made bed. He pats the mattress beside him, and she sits, highly aware of the coolness of his thigh a few inches from hers. 

“This is about soul-marks, isn’t it?” He accuses. “Before you ask, nobody said anything, I’m just observant.” 

“You don’t sound too enthused,.” she comments, watching the twitch of her honey-brown fingers a hair away from his. 

“People think into it too much,.” he answers. “Like, it’s there, and that’s great, but you don’t have to let it be such a big deal, you know? And no offense, Blue, but you overthink things. You all do.” He waves his hand towardsforwards the rest of Monmouth in a reference to their mutual friends. 

“Well, do you have a soulmate?” She shoots back quickly, defensive. 

He smiles a soft, distant smile, like most of Noah is off somewhere she can’t reach. 

_I used to be more, when I was alive,_ she remembers him telling her, and she is suddenly so very _angry_ , angry that she has to grieve someone she never knew because some dispossessed rich kid cracked open his skull, angry that she can’t kiss Gansey or he’ll die, angry that he will die, and if what she knows about fate is true, there isn’t anything she can do about it, angry at herself for not being able to see what her heritage says she should. 

“Not anymore.” He says finally, and holds out his wrist. It’s as smudged as his eye, nearly-transparent skin leading into a murky blotch of gray. Blue tries to focus her eyes on it, but finds she can’t. 

“It disappeared?” she asks finally, and despite the mug in her hand, her mouth feels as dry as a desert. All the anger has bled out of her, leaving her feeling nearly as cold as the boy beside her. She quietly kicks off her shoes, and sits back, arms wrapped around knees tucked under a chin. 

Noah shrugs. “I guess Gleyndower didn’t think some dead boy needed to be hogging up the soulmate market.”

“Oh-“ she whispers, tucking herself tighter until she‘s a ball of limbs. “I’m sorry. I know that doesn’t really mean much.” 

Noah scoots closer until they’re touching, shoulder-to-arm. When they make contact, she feels the prickle of feeling sapping slowly from the limb, like syrup from the bottle. It isn’t unpleasant; it‘s like falling asleep, calm and dreamy. 

He takes a deep, shuddering breath, energy seeming to glow from under his pale skin. She wonders if he ever looks this real around anyone else; she doubts it. 

“It’s not a big deal, not having a soulmate- I mean, lots of people don’t. I didn’t care about it that much when I was, well. You know— alive. I had a girlfriend, and she probably wasn’t my soulmate, but I liked her a lot.” 

“You had a girlfriend?” Blue blurts. She tries to fit this into the mosaic of pre-death Noah she’s made in her mind. The decrepit mustang, the skateboard, this girlfriend. It’s a familiar image, but the boy next to her isn’t where she’s seen it. 

Noah cracks a grin, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. “Jealous?” 

“Just surprised.” 

“Hey!” He frowns playfully. “I know I wasn’t a bad kisser. Did I really lose that much?” 

Blue raises an eyebrow before unfurling from her ball of limbs to laugh. “No- it’s just. I don’t know where I got the idea from. You haven’t mentioned her.” 

Noah sighs sadly, and the playful air dissolves like sugar in water. It’s so easy to forget that he’s dead, to forget that he was _murdered,_ until it’s not. “I only talk about stuff I still have— not that she was ‘stuff’, I mean! Just that-. I mean, I’m not him anymore. That was alive Noah.” 

Blue nods, and without thinking reaches to grasp his cold hand in hers. He blinks, and then he shivers a little, eyes closed. A soft smile forms on his lips. 

“You keep saying that you were ‘s _omething more’_ when you were,” she forms air parentheses with her unoccupied hand, “-‘alive’, but I don’t think that’s true. You’re just a different Noah. Different, not less. God, that sounds cheesy. It’s true though.” 

Noah opens his eyes and looks towards her, eyes alive in a sea of death’s memory. 

“Thanks, Blue Sargent. That means a lot more than you think.” He responds quietly. He grips her hand a little more firmly, pauses in consideration, and finally, slowly lowers his head onto her shoulder. Noah’s a good deal taller than her, so he has to swing his legs up onto the bed and scoot around a bit before the position isn’t painfully awkward. 

Blue feels a little bit like a fawn has decided to wander out of the woods and into her lap; she finds herself scared to breathe, as if she’ll scare him away. 

Cautiously, she lifts a hand to his hair, pale-brush strokes of whitish-blond that shift in the corner of her vision. 

“Can I?” She asks, fingers hovering over his head. 

“Yeah, go ahead. Please.” He mumbles into her shoulder. 

She begins to pet his head slowly, letting it run between her fingers. When it brushes her wrist, her soulmark, a shock runs up her spine for the slightest moment. A blink, and it’s gone. 

_Huh_ , she thinks. Probably just a weird-ghostly thing. 

“God, you are so blond. It’s like, white. Was it always like this?” Blue asks, watching the platinum flicker and bob in and out of corporeality and her fingers. 

“I bleached it.” Noah mumbles, a watery pink dusting his ear. “Bleach-blonde. It was darker than that, naturally. Sort of like Gansey’s.” He sounds embarrassed. This, like the other truths of the other Noah, Blue tries to fit into the picture in her mind. She imagines this bright, strange Noah, driving his flashy car and impulsively bleaching his hair from a box in the bathroom sink. 

“I like it.” Blue says quietly, and she’s not sure if she likes the pale hair or if she likes Noah, but does it really matter? 

Noah smiles, the memory of a dimple peeking out from where his face meets her skin. 

After a moment Noah begins to talk, voice strangely clear despite his face being pressed into her. It is a phenomenon in the same vein as him weighing nothing and not registering on a heat camera; Noah is someone only adjacent to the idea of existence; most of the blanks are filled in by their own heads. 

_It shows what you are expecting to see_ , Gansey had said of the shifting fish in the pool. Perhaps Noah was the same way. Blue frowns; it seems wrong, the idea of another person being defined entirely by other’s’ perception. 

“I wouldn’t have cared that much if I just didn’t have a soulmate,” Noah explains softly, “-but it hurt to have it retracted, like hey, you’re not a real person anymore, you won’t be needing this!” 

“Like the ley-line decided that you didn’t have the potential of a real person.” Blue guesses, instantly regretting the words. “Not that I’m saying that! Sorry, I shouldn’t have tried to put words in-“ 

Noah, however, and shoots up ram-rod straight, something sharp but not angry in his pale eyes. Like a hawk, Blue thinks, very, very aware. It’s not an unfamiliar expression on Ronan or Adam or even Gansey in the midst of a discovery, but it paints Noah as something foreign. 

“Yeah,” Noah responds carefully, “...like I don’t have any more possibility left for me.” 

_This is your card,_ Maura’s voice murmurs in Blue’s mind, _the Page of Cups._

“What about yours?” Noah asks suddenly, a clear attempt to change the subject. “That’s why you wanted to talk to me, right?” 

_I’m not going to force him to talk about it_ , Blue thinks. She holds out her wrist, and Noah grasps it softly. 

“It’s the ley-line.” she points out, and she can’t see Noah’s eyes but from the tone of his voice she knows they’re rolling. 

“I am friends with Gansey, you know. And his roommate.” 

He leans back on the bed, pulling up his knees to mirror Blue. “Well,” he muses, “that mark could mean any of us, couldn’t it?” 

“Who says it’s one of you?” Blue shoots back, indignant. Noah rolls his eyes, and this time she can see it. 

“I never said it’s _one_ of us.” he mutters. Under her questioning glance, his ears flush to a near-living shade. He studies his wrist intently, mirroring Ronan’s fiddling with his leather bracelets. 

Of course, no bracelets circle his wrist, so he just circles his finger around and around and around. 

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Blue interrogates. Noah tucks himself further into a cocoon of his limbs, a pale ghostly turtle. 

“Nothing.” He mumbles, and he looks so frail and pitiful that Blue immediately feels like the world’s biggest asshole for pursuing it. 

Still, the words ring insistently in some corner of her mind. That’s the funny thing about Noah; he always knows exactly what Blue wants, what she needs, without having to ask. Maybe that’s what love is, she thinks sadly. 

“That’s not exactly what I wanted to tell you about, though. There’s something else.” She says, and her voice hangs hoarse and strange in the air. That’s another funny thing about Noah; sometimes being with him feels like being with no one but yourself; the universe trying to reconcile the real and the impossible, the magical and the mundane, a brain trying to thin-slice the gaps between the truth and the imagined. 

“Yeah?” Noah asks finally, unfurling himself and peering at her with that unusually -sharp expression. “What is it, Blue?” His hand moves upward in jolty movements, hovering above an unruly rift of her curly hair before retreating to his side, a too -fast, glitched sort of jolt. 

“Before I tell you-“ Blue leans in closer, and tries not to think of his sweet, cool lips. She fixes his eyes with her own, trying to mirror his earnest, intense gaze. “-I want you to know that only my family knows about this. It’s- it’s a secret.” 

Noah smiles, a little quirk of the lip. For a moment, a pale line seems to flit along the edge of his mouth like a scar. Blue tries to focus upon it and it disappears; scars were proof of having survived, of incidents bearing testament to life. It doesn’t look right, in the shadows of Noah’s form. 

“Does that make me family?” He asks playfully. 

“Careful- I did kiss you.” Blue deadpans in response. 

Noah shrugs. “Different kinds of family. Ok, so what’s the secret?” 

“Do you have to be so casual about this?” 

“I could start chanting in Latin or something, if that would help?” He offers. 

“God, no. I am sick of Latin.” She grumbles. 

“Only ancient language I know.” He responds mock-mournfully. “Hey-“ his hand finds Blue’s knee comfortingly. “Take as long as you want. I’ll be here.” 

It reminds Blue of Noah’s own secret, of the long minutes of her and him and Ronan sitting side-by-side in the yellowish-light of the Monmouth Windows. Of Noah whispering ‘Whelk’ and sobbing tearlessly at his own betrayal. 

“I had another soul-mark, before this one.” she begins. Noah blinks. 

“Is it still there?” he asks. 

“No, but- wait, is this a thing? Like, a magical thing? Have you heard of this?” 

“No, but I used to have another body before this one. Which is pretty weird, I guess. I’m not easy to shock.” Noah points out. Blue sighs, a little disappointed. Lately more than ever, her life feels like a big ‘Fill-In-The-Blank’ puzzle, with too many questions and hardly any answers. 

“When I was nine, on Saint Mark’s Eve, I got into an accident.” she explains. Noah’s eyebrows seem to crease, although it could just be a shadow shifting on his pale face. 

“2007?” he asks. Blue nods. He frowns. 

“That’s the day I died.” He murmurs, and Blue winces. 

“Sorry, I didn’t think of that-“ she addresses hastily. 

“No,” Noah interrupts, “it’s okay. It’s just weird.” 

“Well,” Blue reasons, “St Mark’s Eve is a weird night.” 

Noah nods in agreement, but his glacier-blue eyes have gained that cloudy, distant quality of someone deep in thought. 

“Anyway,” she continues, and _god_ , it feels good to finally tell somebody, “my mom and I were at the ruins of that old church where we buried your bones-“

Noah grimaces. “The creepy one, right.” 

Blue rolls her eyes. “For a ghost, you are _so_ squeamish. Anyway, we go there every year to access the ley-line, except in my family, we called it something else: ‘The Corpse Road’.”

Noah narrows his eyes. “Does this secret have to do with me, Blue? With this?” He waves his hand through the wall, the fingers clipping in and out of reality. Blue feels sick; guilt anchoring in her gut, impossibly heavy. She grips Noah’s frigid hand tighter, seeking comfort, humanity, but no pulse beats through his veins. Not anymore.

Blue, though, has plenty of life to go around. The vacuum of Noah’s skin swallows energy from her own in greedy swallows, a desperate fight against entropy. She shivers. 

“No, at least-“ Blue stops abruptly, words feeling heavy and useless in her mouth. She takes a deep breath, like Maura before a particularly difficult reading. It doesn’t help; things, it seems, can never be that easy. 

“I don’t know.” she whispers helplessly. It’s the truest thing about herself she can say, and it feels like a bleeding knife wound in some vital artery. 

That’s the funny thing about some truths; sometimes, you really ought to lie. Fate is a nigh-unconquerable bitch, but blind and stalwart optimism has a shot. 

“Oh.” Noah’s voice is a sad little puff of noise in the still air. He lets his head fall against the wall, noiseless where there ought to be a thump. He closes his eyes, a blue beacon dissolved by the stormy cloud of his cracked-in skull. For a moment, he is completely still, a marble statue of a boy, a forgotten skeleton in the woods, a portrait of something lost. 

Then, against all odds, his eyes open. It is something like a miracle. _He_ is something like a miracle. 

“Okay.” He says, “what happens next?” 

_Noah,_ Blue thinks, _you unlikely and wonderful boy_. 

“Noah,” she says, “I think I really could kiss you.” 

A Mona Lisa smile is his response, and he is not confused, and he understands.

“Yes,” he agrees, “at least we know that.” 

And so she tells him the story of miracles one and three with number two humming sweetly in the space where their hands meet. 

At a certain point in the story, Noah has a thought that can be most aptly summarized as this; _Oh_. 

He says nothing about this realization; after all, some truths hurt less if you let them stay buried. 

He does say this: “Have you heard of John Keats?” 

“What?” is Blue’s confused response. 

“No, probably not, I figured. Anyway, he’s this old English poet who wrote about something he called ‘negative capability’.” 

“Oh, God.” Blue says, horrified. “You sound like Gansey.” 

“I did go to Aglionby.” Noah points out sheepishly, hand tracing the outline of his ever-present raven-embroidered sweater. “I took a poetry elective.” 

“Ok, I’ll bite; why should I give a rat’s ass about what some dead white guy had to say?” A moment, and then she adds, “Sorry. Didn’t really consider my audience with that one.” 

Noah has to let go of her hand to laugh, a full-bodied endeavor of curling limbs and pale, bobbing cowlicks. When he’s done, he smooths down a tuft of hair near Blue’s forehead and grins. 

“I’m going to tell Ronan that I’ve decided to hang out with someone who makes funny jokes about my death.” He decides cheerfully. 

“Please don’t,” Blue retorts with a smirk, “you’re the closest thing he has to impulse control.” 

Noah shrugs bashfully and begins to talk. 

“Okay so ‘negative capability’ is basically the idea that in order to make something great you have to kind of eschew logic- like you have to accept seemingly contradicting or vague and confusing ideas without overthinking it. Like, everything is a big mess and there are no clear answers and that’s okay,.” he explains. 

“You’re telling me to stop worrying about my soul-marks?” Blue guesses. 

“Sort of, I guess. Look.” Noah spreads out his hands, and it’s such a Gansey-like gesture that for a moment Blue is taken aback. “Maybe the whole ‘soul-mark’ thing isn’t as organized or exact as you’re taking it to be. Maybe it’s not a clear reference to a single person, but more of a suggestion, if that makes sense? Like, here’s an arrow pointing to one of many possible directions, if you want it.” 

Blue nods, eyebrows furrowed. “Go on.” 

“I mean, let’s think about it.” Noah continues. “Most people don’t even meet their ‘soulmates’, supposedly. And plenty of those people are happy and in love and stuff like that. That’s not even considering all the people without marks at all! There’s not even an exact way of knowing whether your mark refers to a certain person or not; you’re running blind without any closure. The only way to be satisfied in this situation is to accept it for the mess it is, you know?” 

Blue blows out air through her nose. After a moment: “But what about my true love?” 

Noah scrunches his nose in confusion. “What?” 

“The one that’ll die if I kiss ‘em. You know, the reason we made out.” 

Noah grins. “Oh, right. Well, true love and soulmate aren’t necessarily the same thing, right? Lots of people fall in love with people who probably aren’t their soulmates. A soulmate is the theory, whereas true love is the application.” 

Blue groans. “You’re making it hard to forget that you were a raven boy.” 

Noah blinks. “Wait, is that what you call us? That’s so cute! Is it just you or do like all the Henri-“ 

“Oh my god-“ Blue groans and smothers his face with a pillow. It doesn’t actually impair his ability to talk, being a ghost and all, but he shuts up anyway; one must, after all, respect the natural law of pillow-smothering.

_It won’t be you._

So apparently Adam is part of the ley-line now, or something. Blue checks, double checks, and triple checks. Nope, she’s pretty sure he still isn’t her true love. Not that type of love, anyway. 

Gansey is also still pretty attractive, she observes with a hot flush to her neck. She is, unfortunately, in deeper than the Mariana trench. 

_Still, it wouldn’t hurt to check._

“Adam? Adam!” Blue’s voice rings through the door to Adam’s church -room, loud and impatient. 

She knocks again, harder, and winces when a splinter embeds itself into her knuckle. She kicks the bottom of the door with the side of her boots, not hard, just enough to make a _thump_. 

“ _Christ,_ Blue- I was in the shower, give me a moment-” The door opens, and there’s Adam, hair near-black with water. 

“I need to see your soulmark.” She declares before she loses the nerve, pushing herself past him and through the doorway. 

“Oh.” He replies, dumbly. His neck flares pink. “Is this for Gleylndower or something? Or, uh-” Her glances away from her face, concentrating on the door left ajar. He shuts it quietly with the point of his bare foot.”-or, for. Y’know. Other reasons.” He finishes, hopeful. 

Blue shuffles her weight from foot to foot, acutely aware of what had happened last time they were in this room together. 

“It’s not-” she begins, soft but firm. She pauses, thinks. “I meant what I said, Adam.” 

She makes an aborted motion with her hand, as if to touch him, but thinks better of it. It hangs in the air, heavy and awkward. 

“Oh. Okay.” Adam says finally, sounding a little choked. “So does this have to do with magic, or something?” 

“Or something.” she agrees. 

“Okay. Okay.” He takes a deep breath. “It’s on my shoulder; I’m going to have to take my shirt off.” His voice is all apologetic Henrietta drawl, slow and sweet. Blue loves him, loves him more than she can explain, but it’s not quite the type of love he’s looking for. 

“Alright- should I turn around, or?” 

Adam shrugs. “You’re going to see it anyway, right?” he reasons. 

_It’s different, watching you do it._ Blue thinks, but she doesn’t say it. She’s still reeling from telling Adam that she’s ‘very young’; she doesn’t need to say any more stupid things. 

He pulls off his shirt from the back of the neck. It sticks to his still-damp skin, and he has to tug again, harder. This effectively breaks the air of awkwardness, and Blue tries to hold back giggles before realizing Adam is laughing too. 

They stand there, in the sweltering heat of the church-room laughing as he wrestles the tee from his back and the water drips, down, down, down, and more than anything else, they are _young._

And then she sees his mark. 

“Oh.” She breathes, because his mark is a thief of a sight, stealing words from lips and air from the lungs. 

A tar-black raven spreads over Adam’s right shoulder, it’s large black wing stretching protectively past his collarbone. 

“Oh.” Blue says again. She steps forward, moving nearly in a trance. Both of them hold their breath as her fingertips hover over his skin, close enough to feel the heat of the other in the air. 

Blue blinks, looking a little frazzled. She gives her head a little shake; the spikes of her dark hair bob with the movement. “May I?” she asks, voice colored with embarrassment. 

Adam opens his mouth to respond, moves his lips into position to say ‘yes’, and stops. “Do you have to?” he whispers, sad and more than anything else, so, _so tired._

“No-” Her voice catches in the air, giving way to a sharp silence. “No, I don’t. Sorry, I just. . . It’s beautiful, you know?” Blue presses her wrist into the crook of her arm, suddenly self-conscious. It’s absurd, because she’s never cared much about soulmates anyway, but looking at Adam, looking at the inky tapestry of fate on his skin, it’s impossible not to. Soulmates in theory are one thing, but here, gazing at the protective hook of a claw hovering just above his nipple, they seemed so very _real._

“Is it?” The question is quiet but fierce, almost desperate. “What does it mean?” His voice is only a whisper, but it rings with the clarity of a scream. 

“I’m not a psychic.” Blue whispers back, suddenly terrified of being too loud, as if she could keep truths from herself by slipping them under her ears. 

“I’m not asking a psychic, I’m asking you.” He responds, and lights something warm and unexpected in her chest. 

She looks, _looks,_ trying to _know_ ; she’s seeing in a scream, but she’s not a psychic, and she doesn’t hear even the slightest echo. 

“It-” she sighs, feeling defeated and small. “It looks like Chainsaw.” She says, because it really does, and she can only tell him what she can see. 

The feathers of the bird seem to flutter as Adam jolts, his musculature clenching all at once. 

“What is it?” she asks, and she doesn’t have to be a psychic to see the fire of realization in his eyes. 

“It’s Chainsaw.” is his response, flat from shock. 

Blue’s eyebrows crease. “The bird? The bird is your soulmate?” 

Adam blinks, confused, and then he’s hunched over, laughing in great gasps against the wall. 

“No-” he gets out in between bouts of mirth, “No, I mean the mark. I’m not- I’m not going to fuck a bird.” 

“Ronan would kill you.” she agrees, smiling despite her confusion. Adam’s energy is contagious, and it’s hard to not feel brilliant standing in the vicinity of it. It’s almost Gansey-like, in it’s infectious charisma. 

“Hey,” she begins with a grin, sitting beside him on the floor and drawing up an improbably large puff of dust. He slides awkwardly against the slanted ceiling beams to rest beside her, shoulder-to-shoulder, landing on the floor with a little _thwump!_ “This is your soulmate we are talking about, sir-- you will not be _making hypothetical love_ to that bird.” 

This sends him into another spiral of giggles, his raven flapping in rhythm with his shaking shoulders. 

“Ow.” He stops with a wince, reaching back to feel his shoulder blade. “Splinter.” 

Blue winces sympathetically, and in the ensuing silence she realizes. _Oh,_ she thinks, and says nothing. 

“Did you figure out what you needed to know?” He asks finally. His knees are pulled up to his bare chest, and his eyes are somewhere distant on the horizon. _I did_ , goes unsaid between them. 

“Yeah, I mean- no. I’m closer, I think.” Blue responds, mind racing to re-contextualize Ronan in her mind, pouring over every remembered glance towards Adam, every brush of hands against skin. 

“That’s good.” He responds, and he sounds like he means it. 

_Gansey’s pulse was fast and firm where his wrist caressed Blue’s neck. She could feel his breath, could feel the hot scent of mint on her skin. His eyelashes caught the Henrietta sunset, drops of iridescence over lidded amber-eyes. He seemed to glow from within, skin near-red with the flush of emotion and sun._

I’m going to kill you _, Blue thought._ And I think I’m in love with you.

_On this ancient mountain, with magic thrumming through the Appalachian ley-line and boys not-quite-dead and Welsh kings lying in slumber, and above all else miracles, it seemed so easy for both things to be true._


End file.
